One issue that a wireless communications network often faces is that its performance is degraded when the signal strength of receiving signals of customer premises equipment (CPE), e.g. a mobile station (MS), is weakened as a result of changes in geological locations or channel conditions of the CPE. The capability of having multiple antennas on a base transceiver station (BTS) is one of the contributing factors for the development of various techniques to deal with this issue.
Signal strength degrades in various situations. For example, the closer a CPE gets to the border of two cells, the weaker signal strength becomes. Signal strength becomes the weakest when a CPE is located on the border, as it is farthest from the BTSs serving the corresponding cells. Weakened signals result in degraded services received by the CPE.
Another situation in which services received by a CPE are degraded is when a handover process occurs. Handover typically happens when a CPE moves away from the cell in which a serving BTS resides and enters an adjacent cell that is served by another BTS; namely, a target BTS, which results in switching wireless connection from the serving BTS to the target BTS. One requirement of handover is that wireless connectivity needs to be maintained throughout the process.
In order to improve the performance of a wireless communications network, a BTS equipped with multiple antennas employs one of the following techniques: beamforming, space-time coding (STC), or spatial multiplexing/multi-input-multi-output (MIMO). Beamforming improves the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). STC provides spatial diversity while MIMO provides spatial multiplexing.
These techniques can be adopted by different kinds of wireless/mobile networks, such as cellular networks, local area networks (WLAN), personal area networks (WPAN), and sensor networks. They are also applicable to various multiple access methods such as time-division-multiple-access (TDMA), frequency-division-multiple-access (FDMA), code-division-multiple-access (CDMA), wave-division-multiple-access (WDMA), and orthogonal-frequency-division-multiple-access (OFDMA).
Although conventional methods improve the services provided to a CPE, the quality of these services is not optimal in some cases. Therefore, what is desired is a method to further improve services received by a CPE when signal strength degrades as a result of being close to the border of a plurality of cells.